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Ashotep 13,713

I believe in causality. I'm not a scientist like you and really don't understand everything you are talking about. I know for every action there is a reaction. Slap someone and you will probably get slapped, raise a child in a unloving enviroment and they will probably have a hard time showing love.

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Ludwik 9

I believe in causality. I'm not a scientist like you and really don't understand everything you are talking about. I know for every action there is a reaction. Slap someone and you will probably get slapped, raise a child in a unloving enviroment and they will probably have a hard time showing love.

Yes,the word "probably" is often needed; some predictions are exact (deterministic) while others are not exact (probabilistic). Predictions based on the law of supply and demand, for example, are probabilistic.

L.K.

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Jason K 0

I wouldn't even say your second diagram is correct. No cause can be linked with its effect absolutely. For instance, when we observe a match being struck to produce fire, we cannot be certain that the striking of the match was the actual cause of the fire. Our minds merely observe a succession of events - first, the match being struck and, second, the flame erupting into being - and it is only through our past experiences of watching a similar succession of events that enables us to assume the two are causally linked. But we can never be sure that this assumption is valid. The fire might well have been produced by something else entirely, by an event or force that our minds, for whatever reason, are unable to observe. It could be that hidden space aliens orbiting the earth produced the fire, to use an extreme example. Who knows? And even if we were able to observe the aliens producing this fire, we would have no way of knowing whether this was really happening either. Perhaps there are yet further hidden factors involved?

David Hume established this in the 18th century.

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Ludwik 9

I wouldn't even say your second diagram is correct. No cause can be linked with its effect absolutely. For instance, when we observe a match being struck to produce fire, we cannot be certain that the striking of the match was the actual cause of the fire. Our minds merely observe a succession of events - first, the match being struck and, second, the flame erupting into being - and it is only through our past experiences of watching a similar succession of events that enables us to assume the two are causally linked. But we can never be sure that this assumption is valid. The fire might well have been produced by something else entirely, by an event or force that our minds, for whatever reason, are unable to observe. It could be that hidden space aliens orbiting the earth produced the fire, to use an extreme example. Who knows? And even if we were able to observe the aliens producing this fire, we would have no way of knowing whether this was really happening either. Perhaps there are yet further hidden factors involved? ...

1) I agree that "a succession of events" does not mean that one of them is the cause of another. It is only a necessary condition for this.

2) And yes, "perhaps" there are such hidden factors to be discovered. Causality is established by a theory, which can be either accepted or rejected, depending on what we know.

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diablo_04 213

I believe in chaos theory, i don't think every action can be explain and everything is for some cause, then explain me this, what is the cause for this all, i mean the universe, that imply god is involved, and then stops to be science.

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Cranberry Nymph 3

Thank you for sharing your article, its definitely food for thought. It makes sense that "A single event can be due to several different causes and each event can cause more than one event," I suspect that even what appears to be chaos is part of the ordered flow of events within the universe, the causes are often not recognized by the individual. As you said, an event can be interpreted in many ways. Each of those interpretations being dependent upon the individual's perspective.

And what about Synchronicity? Ha ha... another can of worms. Carl Jung proposed that synchronistic events lie outside the realm of cause and effect. I would not presume to disagree with him comprehensively, as I have much to learn. But I feel that maybe synchronicity is also orchestrated by the laws of the universe. And what beautiful harmony makes up this exquisite song of life!

What happens, as in Fig. 2., when all the event arrows point to one event?

That would change Figure 2 only. Nothing would change in our material world.

I was thinking that I wouldn't want to be that central event, although it might mean I've won the lottery!

There has been discussions here recently about Time Machines. Do you think there could be invented a kind of Causal Event Machine?

What I mean is, is there an underlying mechanism deeper than the usual cause/effect relationships that we experience? It seems to me cause and effects can be a product of randomness, in the sense that cause/effect is sometimes produced by probabilities These we may call coincidences.

But, are there any true randomly occurring events in the universe? If there are no probabilistic random events, if causality rules, then we live in a Newtonian universe, in this sense.

If events on the quantum scale can be considered random, then, fundamentally, events in the universe are random. The boundary between the scale of quantum events and events on our scale may be blurred, but they are also connected to some degree. The influence of this connection may be small, but it still must exist.

What I'm trying to get at is, do random probabilities produce cause/effect, or is cause/effect the product of deterministic events?

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digidigibam 5

Hello fellow beings of light where information passes thru. How are ya? Causality must be, but only in the the reality of duality can it exist? I am a slave to causality, it's what brought us in to this mess. This then that, if that then this. And there the manifestation begun. If only i had a choice? Or is the choice the action or reaction? What if your aware of the choice that is given by you...

... Do you think there could be invented a kind of Causal Event Machine? ...

All kind of machines can be invented, and named in different ways. Let us wait for the invention.

L.K.

What I mean is, let us say we want some specific event to happen. We feed into the Machine this event, then the Machine calculates all the possible causes for this event to occur, and produces the most probable causes for this event to happen.

Of course, the machine would have to know and understand a great deal of data. A Theory of Everything would be helpful in this respect. If the machine had the TOE in its data bank, it could predict the probabilities of our preferred event to occur given the right causal circumstances.

I want one of these Machines. So, someone please invent it soon.

Edited July 17, 2012 by StarMountainKid

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Ludwik 9

... Do you think there could be invented a kind of Causal Event Machine? ...

What I mean is, let us say we want some specific event to happen. We feed into the Machine this event, then the Machine calculates all the possible causes for this event to occur, and produces the most probable causes for this event to happen.

Of course, the machine would have to know and understand a great deal of data. A Theory of Everything would be helpful in this respect. If the machine had the TOE in its data bank, it could predict the probabilities of our preferred event to occur given the right causal circumstances.